Blank Forms

Out this June: a new book from Blank Forms Editions, culled from the archives of legendary composer Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009). Very limited edition; pre-orders are live at the link in bio. Set in the year 2021, INTELLIGENT LIFE follows the employees of Supreme Connections Inc., a music entertainment corporation navigating a future in which artificial intelligence generates music faster than composers can. Anticipating an industry-wide downturn, Supreme Connections president Aplisa Kandel seeks advanced technologies that will revolutionize the act of listening and the future of music, including a bio-music script that lets the user hear Bach from the aural perspective of a reindeer and a wearable device that goes beyond replicating the mechanical tympanic resonances of the listening subject to produce the “listening mind” or the “sophisticated perceiver”—capturing and reproducing all the emotional and psychological associations unique to each individual. Though Amacher could not realize Intelligent Life in any of its intended forms—she theorized its publication as a serialized radio broadcast and television simulcast, among other configurations—she continued designing “treatments” for the opera for much of her career. This volume makes the most complete of these working documents—including episodic scripts, notes on the use of LaserDisc, and an illustrated storyboard for the pilot—available to the public for the first time.

Ahmed Abdullah's memoir A STRANGE CELESTIAL ROAD has been praised as “monumental” (@tnycjr ), “a revelation” (@jazzjournal ), and “a gold mine for jazz fans, scholars, and historians” (@thewiremagazine ). This May, Abdullah curates a series of live concerts at Sistas’ Place, commemorating African Liberation Month and the fiftieth anniversary of WILDFLOWERS: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions. Saturdays at 8pm and 9:30pm $30 advance / $35 at door / cash only Sistas’ Place 456 Nostrand Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11216 May 16: Andrew Cyrille May 23: Alex Blake May 30: Mike Monford @mikemonfordmusic June 13: Mejedi Owusu @mejediowusu @sistas_place @moniquengozinriwriter

Out next month: INTELLIGENT LIFE, a media opera by Maryanne Amacher—written in the 1980s and now available to the public for the first time. Set in the year 2021, Intelligent Life follows the employees of Supreme Connections Inc., a music entertainment corporation navigating a future in which artificial intelligence generates music faster than composers can. Though Amacher could not realize Intelligent Life in any of its intended forms—she theorized its publication as a serialized radio broadcast and television simulcast, among other configurations—she continued designing “treatments” for the opera for much of her career. Culled from Amacher’s archives, this volume compiles the most complete of her working documents, including episodic scripts, notes on the use of LaserDisc, and an illustrated storyboard for the pilot. Pre-order your copy at the link in bio, and get it delivered this spring. 🎥: Thurston Moore visits Maryanne Amacher at her home in Kingston, New York on November 20, 2003, as documented in Andrew Kesin and Jonathon Bekemeier’s film daytrip maryanne.

Blank Forms is proud to announce official representation of the estate of Catherine Christer Hennix (1948–2023) through the newly established Etymon Foundation. Since 2016, Blank Forms has been an essential advocate for Hennix’s work, serving as the primary producer of her live performances and publisher of her writings and audio recordings. Following Hennix’s passing in 2023, Blank Forms undertook stewardship of her archives, preserving and organizing her papers, artworks, and personal materials. With The Etymon Foundation—established in collaboration with Hennix’s family and artistic partners—Blank Forms is pleased to formalize its management of Hennix’s estate. Named after Etymon Editions—a small publishing imprint that Hennix founded in the late 1990s to publish her own work, including the seminal release The Electric Harpsichord—The Etymon Foundation will support the preservation, study, publication, exhibition, and performance of her work across disciplines, emphasizing the breadth of her activities as a composer, poet, philosopher, mathematician, and visual artist.

Many thanks to Michiko O (@snirupustimo ) for delivering a gorgeous performance on shō last week at Blank Forms—a live adaptation of her excellent Pancake Moon via @futura_resistenza . Photographs by @arthursillers .

Next Monday, April 27, Michiko O presents a live adaptation of her recent album Pancake Moon, which layers sprightly piano glissandos, with their open, daylit timbres, over discordant swells of organ and the shō’s brittle, glittering pitches. $20 tickets at the link in bio—you won't want to miss this. 📹: @snirupustimo performs at the monthly concert series @experimen.tik (held at @theaterimkino_berlin , supported by @field.notes.berlin_inm ) in 2023, sharing a bill with Eiko Yamada and Bryan Eubanks.

Now featured on the NTS homepage: ROCKERS, Blank Forms’ April episode focusing on Augustus Pablo (1954–1999) and Rockers International, the record store and label that Pablo founded in Kingston, Jamaica. Listen back to this hour of roots reggae and dub—featuring plenty of Pablo on his signature melodica—at the link in our bio.

The indefinable Lary 7 has completed his 70th orbit around the sun today. Hailing from Niagara Falls and landing in New York City in the late 1970s, 7 has become an indispensable part of the fabric of downtown—an instantly recognizable presence and a singular force within the city’s experimental underground. Across decades, he has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Tony Conrad, Tom Verlaine, Swans, Jarboe, Jutta Koether, and Foetus. Happy 70th, 7.

In INTELLIGENT LIFE, Maryanne Amacher treats sound and image as “Cage treated instruments in an orchestra—preparing solos, duets, and trios.” She scores interactions between seven combinatory formats: stereo FM sound; TV monitor sound; simulcast sound; TV image only; TV image with TV sound; simulcast FM sound with TV image; and FM sound with both TV sound and image. These pages display Amacher’s interest in “wearing down” the TV image—rephotographing the original material, transferring it to Xerox, then to slide, then to black and white. As she wrote in her preliminary production agenda for INTELLIGENT LIFE, these transformations helped convey the subjectivities of perception; filtered through successive mediums, the image onscreen appears as though “something has happened to it through a mind.” Buy INTELLIGENT LIFE direct from Blank Forms—at the link in bio—and be the first to receive a copy this June.

Scenes from Madison Greenstone’s sold-out solo show two weeks ago, photographed by Marcus Maddox (@marcus.xoxo ). Resisting classical impulses toward smoothness and solidity in melody, @mads_green_stone instead probes the clarinet’s outermost possibilities, drawing the listener’s attention to the instrument’s heterogeneity. Though the clarinet is traditionally monophonic, Greenstone works in a fluent polyphonic mode, deploying psychoacoustic anomalies and extreme techniques to produce shrill sparks of flickering sound scattered over low, hooting pulses, or serene phantom tones that float over a cicada-esque droning. Don’t miss our next shows—tickets at the link in bio for Dafne Vicente-Sandoval and Charles Curtis on Sun 4/19 and Michiko O (@snirupustimo ) on Mon 4/27.

Now online @friezeofficial : Matthew Rana (@poems.from.the.daud ) reviews CC HENNIX, a survey exhibition of Catherine Christer Hennix (1948–2023) at Malmö Konsthall, on view now through May 17th. As Rana writes, “Made in collaboration with the non-profit curatorial platform Blank Forms and Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, this visually spare yet idea-rich presentation brings together seldom-seen pieces, including a number of delicate works on paper, ranging from ‘Color Algebra’ (c.1970–80)—a series of tempera patterns in red, blue, black and white—to letterset transfers from the early 1990s featuring the algebraic symbols of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as in Untitled (Savoir) with its inscription ‘S2’.” CC HENNIX will be on view at Badischer Kunstverein later this year, running from July 10–November 15.

Tickets on sale now for MICHIKO O’s solo show later this month, during which she will perform a version of her recent record Pancake Moon, adapted for live performance. A clarinetist by training, @snirupustimo (Michiko Ogawa) came to the shō through her research on artist Teiji Ito; though the shō is traditionally associated with gagaku, a centuries-old form of Japanese court music relying on a sixteen-piece ensemble, Ito freely recombined the instrument with self-taught fluencies in Portuguese fado guitar and American jazz drumming, forging an idiosyncratic sound spurred by his omnivorous interest in whatever instrument was at hand. Ogawa, too, works in a syncretic mode, layering sprightly piano glissandos, with their open, daylit timbres, over discordant swells of organ and the shō’s brittle, glittering pitches. The effect is simultaneously eerie and serene, never quite identifiable as either. Her sonic architectures are designed to accommodate such unresolved contradictions. Working with pre-recorded piano, organ, and sounds from Joshua Tree and Berlin, Ogawa performs on the shō, capturing and looping fragments in real time and feeding them through a synthesizer that extends the instrument’s tuning. The synthesizer operates less as an additional layer than as a continuation of the shō itself, allowing the performance to shift subtly with each iteration. What emerges is not a fixed version of the album, but a framework—responsive to the space and moment, and not intended to be repeated in the same way twice. Photo: Kate Clark.